By Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO, Oct 20 2008 (IPS)

The global financial debacle is evidence that capitalism “is more alive than ever” and can only be stopped by policies that extinguish all forms of profit or by the end of life on Earth, says Chilean professor and activist Marcel Claude.

Economist Marcel Claude Credit: Daniela Estrada/IPS

The speculative bubble of the U.S. real estate market was just the trigger. A deeper explanation is the decline of the “real economy,” because governments have allowed the concentration of property and an increase in inequality and poverty to the benefit of the “financial economy,” says Claude, an economist, in this interview with Tierramérica.

With a Master’s degree from the University of Chile and as a doctoral candidate at Belgium’s’ Catholic University of Louvain, Claude is a professor in three higher learning institutions in his country and has a long history as an environmental activist.

In 2006 he won a lawsuit against the Chilean government at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for access to public information, and he was also successful in a legal case over the conflict of interests in the debate on the Chilean Law on Fisheries.

TIERRAMÉRICA: Today everyone is theorising about capitalism because of the global financial crisis. What do you understand “capitalism” to be? MARCEL CLAUDE: At least people are talking about capitalism again. We had only been talking about globalisation, about neoliberalism. But capitalism exists; it is more alive than ever and will continue to live for a long time. The current crisis is proof of that.

Capitalism is the search for profit, for the profit margin. What drives capitalism are two mortal sins: avarice and greed, not human virtues like solidarity, justice, truth and love.

All capitalist institutions tend to favour this. If private property leads to profit, good. If not, capitalism will step right over it. The same thing happens with the political constitution of the government or the financial regulatory system.

The problem is that profit is always obtained from a basis of exploitation. It always tries to obtain the wealth that is on the other side. And there are two sources of that wealth: the labour of humanity and the productivity of natural ecosystems.

The capitalist maintains that productive activity “creates” wealth, but it is simply a “conversion,” a “transformation” of wealth, which comes primarily from nature. Wealth is the biological productivity of natural ecosystems.

Capitalism is a brutal, Mephistophelian intervention in vital systems, which it converts into economic products out of necessity to sustain human life. But because capitalists control the entire productive process they end up appropriating the rights to life.

TIERRAMÉRICA: What effects could the current turmoil have on the reproduction of capitalism? Will we enter a new phase or are we near its end? MC: As long as there is wealth there will be capitalism. Because greed and ambition will always exist, if profit is not to be the determining factor there has to be regulation, to ensure that in the design of government policies there are other values that have greater weight. The other possible factor in the destruction of capitalism is the disappearance of all life on the planet.

In the best of cases, we could advance towards a more responsible phase. That is, if the big multinational corporations and the influential business executives don’t prevent it. Forty percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP) is in the hands of 200 transnational corporations. Moving into another phase would depend on the magnitude of the crisis and on governments being able to control it and recover from it – which I think is unlikely.

TIERRAMÉRICA: Who will be hurt most by the crisis? MC: The poor, as always. Governments have put the priority on shoring up the financial system with resources coming from taxpayers, which weakens their ability to generate employment, expand the economy and confront social problems. They are choosing to cut spending on education, health, infrastructure and research.

That will mean less economic activity, increased unemployment and a decline in demand. It could reduce pressure on natural resources because of lower production levels, but it could also mean more lax environmental protection policies in order to make other projects more feasible.

TIERRAMÉRICA: If capitalism is not sustainable, what is the alternative? MC: So far no one has constructed an alternative, and I don’t know that it will be necessary. We can’t change a system overnight, but we can intervene in a politically decisive way.

Government policies should be aimed practically at extinguishing all forms of profit, understood as earnings that don’t come from your own work. State policies should be oriented towards a society based on labour. Today there is no link between the wealth of some people and their labour.

The governments should build an economic, political and social order sustained by work. Profit is enemy number one of society and the environment; it is the poison and the opium of the people. The logic of capital is accumulation and the logic of labour is subsistence, maintaining one’s life, which is better for nature.

(*Daniela Estrada is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.)

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